


How To Be Dead

by with_the_monsters



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: AU - Robb lives, F/M, Sibling Incest, just to warn you okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2013-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-31 21:29:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1036597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/with_the_monsters/pseuds/with_the_monsters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing feels sad like not being allowed to love someone.</p><p>(Or, the war ends, the kingdoms come, and Sansa comes home to Robb with an army and a husband at her back.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	How To Be Dead

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dalyeau](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dalyeau/gifts).



War teaches you a lot of things but Sansa thinks the thing it’s taught her best is compartmentalisation. Her mind is like a dresser, these days. Full of drawers she’s lost the keys to. It’s probably best that way. Openness is a step too far.

x

The majority of the population of Westeros has divided its memory neatly down the middle. The war, and what comes next. Thinking back to before is a little too much work for most people. There are ghosts peeking out and they’ve got the strongest grasp imaginable.

Sansa’s divided differently. Before they cut her father’s head off, and after. They’ve achieved peace but her world is still a battleground.

x

Whatever Robb expects the first time his forces meet the Vale’s on a snowy field, it is not his sister. The wind howls wolflike between the two armies as their leaders move forward. Alayne’s hair doesn’t flash fire the way Sansa’s would against the white world, but Robb recognises her all the same.

Harry Hardyng draws a little in front, shakes his blond curls out of his helmet. He holds out a hand to the King in the North, a silver circlet at his own brow.

“Brother,” he says. “It gladdens my heart to see you well. Rumours of your death were greatly exaggerated.”

Robb is looking at Sansa, gaze sliding from crown to hair to armour to impassive eyes.

“Yes,” he replies, tone distracted, “Yes. My sister’s too, I see.”

Harry laughs, then. So young, so bold, so golden. Sansa’s heart still flutters with something halfway interested when he does that. Before the execution, she thinks maybe she’d have been several times in love with him already. Now she just grips her reins harder and continues to study her brother.

“Forgive me,” Harry says sweetly, holding out a hand to draw Sansa forward, “I do hope you can understand why we kept her hidden away.”

By the time Sansa gets off her horse and into Robb’s arms, she’s realised she can’t draw out the Sansa he is expecting. She is too muddled, too much Alayne. Robb watched Sansa, pretty highborn daughter, leave Winterfell. Now on the land before it he greets the Queen in the Vale, silver wrapped around her temples. A winter queen of ice and steel who’s halfway from Alayne to nobody at all.

He pulls off his gloves to drag freezing fingers down her cheek, and the gasp she stifles claws at the tender inside of her throat.

One touch from him and Sansa comes rushing back.

x

She refuses to accompany her husband back to the Eyrie. It is understood that she comprehends the sense it makes to be there – the strategic position, its defensiveness. Her domain. But Sansa has been a bird trapped up among the clouds too long, and it is time she ran with wolves again.

She slips inside Grey Wind’s head like a feather, a thing she does unconsciously these days. She likes to see the world from different points of view. There always seems to be blood in the corners of her human eyes. She likes the way Grey Wind looks at things. The snow makes sense beneath his paws, the brittle charcoal smell of Winterfell soft and sweet in his nose. Robb’s hands on his fur make sense, and the innocence of the submission to his touch does not twist the direwolf’s heart the way it does Sansa’s.

x

“Your hair’s still a little brown at the ends,” Robb comments one afternoon. Sansa pulls it over her shoulder to examine. The colour makes her think of the wrong father – the pretend one, who remade her in his own image and screamed like a child when the Moon Doors opened to eat him whole. (Alayne had been almost surprised, when it happened at last. He’d taken the position of god in her life and she’d thought he might fly when she pushed him out.)

“You must have looked like Arya with it all that colour,” her brother adds. He’s learnt to like these conversations, though he’s the only one who ever does the talking. He needles out of habit, now, looking for any kind of reaction. Sansa smiles down at her saddle. Maybe she had. Arya had been locked so far down she wouldn’t have known her face in a mirror.

x

Her daughter is as pretty as a spring frost when she arrives. Kissed by fire hair, a colour that makes Jon sad and smiley when he comes to meet his new niece. She has Tully blue eyes and golden Hardyng skin and if it wasn’t for Robb settling his furs around Sansa to keep them both warm she’d swear she’d never loved anything as much before or since.

“Little Vale princess,” Harry crows when he arrives at last, fresh snow still stuck to his lashes, “The prettiest princess in the whole world!”

Sansa allows her daughter to be plucked away from her, watches her husband waltz around the room, halfway between laughing and crying. She wishes harder than ever before that she could love him the way he deserves to be loved.

x

By some miracle the kingdoms stay at peace and a little boy with blonde curls and golden limbs and Tully blue eyes joins princess Nalys in the Winterfell nursery. Robb moves closer to his sister when Harry Hardyng comes to plead her home to the Vale, the hand he places on the bench beside her quickly covered with her own. Her voice barely quavers as she stands her ground.

The King of the Vale takes his son and heir home with him the following day, deaf and blind to his wife’s pleas. That night, Sansa leaves her daughter with her nursemaid and creeps to Robb’s chambers. She allows herself to be drawn into his embrace, clinging to his shirt like a child as she presses tear-wet cheeks into his chest. The last two Starks stand together like that as the stars come out, king and queen of winter, the loneliest people on the planet.

x

She goes back to the Vale. Harry builds her a new castle on the valley floor, out of sight of the cold cruel Eyrie. She fills the rooms with blue and grey and white, palace dogs and cats multiplying end over end until she has eyes and ears aplenty to slip away into.

Her third child has Stark grey eyes and curly Tully hair and it never seems to matter how cold the air is, he’s always toasty warm to the touch.

“That winter blood,” Harry jokes over his crib, teasing at his toes, “Powerful stuff.”

Sansa smiles over at him with a new kind of softness. She’s found the drawer she locked Alayne in when Petyr Baelish died and managed to coax her out to play. Alayne is easier. Alayne is clever and pretty and loves Harry Hardyng for his courage and his charm and his hand in saving her from all the people in the world that meant to do her harm. Alayne doesn’t look down at the new prince and wonder if he’s Hardyng the way Myrcella is Baratheon. Doesn’t smell the sharp crisp snow scent of his skin, doesn’t pass delicate fingers down the pale milky expanse of his arms. Doesn’t notice the way Grey Wind minds him like his own cub when the King of the North comes to visit.

(Alayne doesn’t wonder, but Sansa does. And as baby Brandon begins to grow, stocky like his Uncle Robb and not lean and slim like his mother and father and siblings, wondering turns to something very similar to knowing. And knowing – knowing means looking at Robb and feeling the kind of hunger that could drive a dragon to distraction.)


End file.
